It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.
I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employment; maybe they are afraid of losing their health insurance, maybe they are on a visa and can't easily switch jobs, or maybe they simply aren't able to find another job that works for them. Less noble, but maybe the pay is just too good, and if they stay for just a bit longer, it will be life changing. I can totally sympathize with that!
But if this opinion is "extremely common", I would expect that a good number of those people would have the ability to leave, to the point that perhaps Zuckerberg would rethink his strategy.
(I don't really buy the "change things from within" explanation; 1) that rarely works, especially in a company the size of Meta, and 2) if tried, that clearly has not worked, given Meta's continuing trajectory.)
Not really. People fear change. Engineers at Meta almost certainly have good pay, work with people they like, have a generally comfortable life.
So it's easy to see the dilemma in a sense. It's maybe really just a concentrated example of capitalism generally. All money has blood on it
Case 2) FBWorker drinks koolaid (mabye because they cant keep FAANGpaid from forming their identity). Probably noob out of college or someone that just wants FAANG on the resume. Stay and build it. Probably not a lot of talent. And get FAANGpaid.
Case 3) FBWorker generally hates Facebook, maybe a holdover from pre-monetization FB days, why stop your enemy from making a huge mistake? Wait, AND you get FAANGpaid?
Case 4) FBWorker who is principled moralist who once believed they could change the world for the better.
One of the reasons Facebook is in trouble, especially if they actually think the Meta pivot is key, is that almost all their employees are Case 1 or Case 3.
Case 4 quit long ago or doesn't apply anymore.
The question is, is there even a semblance of a core of Case 2 in facebook? Doubt it.
So Marky Z is like a dictator now. Yeah he's top dog of his realm, but motivating people to any fundamental degree isn't possible. Money only goes so far. The organization has purged all the truly motivated talent.
Regarding change from within -- that's what a team dedicated to improving decision making is for.
Wow. What an effective way of encouraging others to leave while discouraging others from applying.
Remember: toxic work environments are reinforced from the top, and the top _only._ Toxic leadership begets toxic work environments, and it looks like Zuck is a right peach in being insufferably toxic.
Show me a big tech company (or any MNC) that is not "building something that is bad for the world". The broader question is why do people keep working for big tech, and that has been answered many times before (lots of money, smart colleagues, interesting problems, and a difference in perception on culpability.)
Also, if the alternative is "work for a small company", some of us have tried that before and that hasn't been very good either, just for different reasons (terrible pay, abusive management, toleration of sexual harassment, etc.).
Understanding The Professional Programmer, p19 - Gerald Weinberg
When you peel back the layers and figure out how this sausage is made, underneath it's just sociology and broad target audiences. (Age, sex, location, social status.)
Retinal scans don't help solve this problem.
We didn't get access to the actual user lists, but the queries you could build in your ad bids could include these factors. We were also in a special "Ads For Travel" partner program, so we probably had bid options not available to the average FB ads account manager.
Creepy methods aside, you're trying to get people to do something other than what they wanted to do today.
I think most workers have accepted this reality. Workplaces are not a democracy. Even if most of the workforce disagrees with a policy that was approved from on high, there is little they can do to change it. Especially in the tech industry, where jobs are so highly-paid and sought-after, there isn't really the option of collective bargaining. And that's even assuming the kinds of snowflakes who tend to work in this industry would accept that Break The Build Joe deserves the same pay as Rewrote It In Rust Rob.
Personally I maintain my own principles around what will drive me to leave, but I have long given up hope that my decision to quit will have any impact whatsoever on the direction of the company. In the past it's barely even had an impact on the people I directly worked with. I'm just not that important, and neither is any other IC or low-level manager. I think most of us try to find a company whose direction we can tolerate just enough to continue working there for the cash. And, I suppose, there are thousands of people for whom Meta still passes that bar.
That's a funny way to say "rich".
Note that, among other things, the power of “the end justifies the means” lies in how it is reductive.
Hoo boy, the old "just take another job" trope. I've got news: First, in this late-stage capitalism neoliberal hell, people have to cling to their jobs for more reasons than anyone can count. Second, where are they going to go? Who is hiring that isn't also doing things that are bad for the world, at a rate that someone with a student loan, a family, a mortgage, and college-bound kids can afford?
Knock it off with the "just get another job" thing and come join the real world.
Most people work for the pay. Thats why you pay people: to make them work on something they dont necessarily like.
Not everyone needs to be or to act like an activist.
It is of course possible to meet one's higher-level needs in other parts of one's life, but if your career is actively opposing your values, it becomes that much harder to make up your needs in the limited time remaining. If you can't make the balance work, burnout and depression are likely.
Your values can only be worth that much, and a big check will make you forget them faster than you think. After all, that's what corruption actually exists: people willing to compromise on whatever they believe or used to believe for financial benefits.
Also don't forget that people will rationalize everything. There's no one going to work every day and hating it - if you stay in a place you don't really like, ultimately you will find reasons to stay and to justify your choice.
Facebook is a giant privacy-violating advertising company that demonstrated repeatedly that it was bad for the world long before Meta happened. And yet they attracted a huge amount of great talent who knew going in what FB was. Microsoft did the same thing in the 90s.
People have their own reasons for joining such companies. Maybe it's stability, or the quality of the team, or freedom, or it looks good on a resume, or maybe it's just the money. I'm not going to judge somebody for any of that.
If I had been working at FB I might have tried to transfer to the metaverse team. Even if I had no confidence it would work it would have been much more interesting than that dying social network. And probably less evil, because it will probably die before it gets big enough to matter.
The "bad for the world" stories I've heard turned out to not have substance (Cambridge analytica and the "harmful to young girls" study). Are you aware of something else?
It's not black and white; there are degrees of separation. You and I participate in an economy that somewhere, many layers down, causes human rights abuses. No ethical consumption under capitalism.
It's impossible to separate completely. Everyone has to pick and choose how many layers of separation (and from what) are needed for them to feel okay about their effect on society. For you or me that might mean we won't work at Facebook or Amazon, but your startup's angel investors aren't angels either. Neither are the companies you buy your devices from, or the banks you lend your savings to.
This isn't to say we shouldn't care, but we shouldn't pretend things are clear-cut, and we should take care throwing rocks at glass houses.
From Oppenheimer onwards this hasn't been too unusual - but what is unusual I think in Meta's case is the fact it's so widespread by smart folks.
Interesting that the book essentially seems to render the "gig economy" as some dystopian element. Quite good prediction.
It is so relevant for today, you'd be forgiven for not knowing it was actually published in 1992.
But really, it's probably the best book I've ever read.
But at least it was a dystopia where pizza delivery was an exciting business.
It wasn't an exciting business.
Pizza delivery was an exciting job (in all the worst ways a job can be exciting, or, TBH, just stressful), but the business part of it was quite boring. The corporate takeover denouement was perhaps the most boring scene in the book, and barely justified the "Chekhov's Guns" that were required to give a baddie a single "oh shit" moment with no payoff.
This is such an incredible quote, I love it. And I love that you said it in your group chat. I wish more people in tech could see this forest from within the trees.
However, I don't believe metaverse is a waste of time, at least for business users. This can eliminate all office space use in about 5-10 years if the hardware and software is ready, which it very likely will. Or maybe a wall to wall LED screen will do the trick for remote social presence, making the headset redundant.
It can spill over from the office to personal lives like the PC did. But anyway, hope you continue to work on cool things.
We used advanced statistical concept and vended models for other teams/services to consume, but the truth is either it was just really obvious cost solutions that they didn't bother, or it didn't really work all that well (stats model are, unfortunately, prone to many interpretations).
I've since moved on to feature based team where I feel like I'm more on the ground. And recently was able to get rid of lots of cost just by.. looking at them. I remain skeptical of the teams that base itself on statistical models to reduce cost.
First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years.
Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "I'm old enough to have read Snow Crash the week it came out and IT WAS A DYSTOPIA, why are we building it?"
Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally.
Fourth, I genuinely have no idea how this decision was made; it was certainly not on the basis of net cost savings. We did the math.